Answered prayer is for other people

It’s a shameful thing to confess, but I’ll admit to feeling this way more than once myself. Maybe you have too.

You have a Christian friend who is telling you about all the answered prayers they’ve received from God. Big things. Small things. Everything.

Externally you rejoice with them and thank God for His work in their lives, but inside you feel a little twinge of … something. You wouldn’t call it envy or anger; it’s more a mixture of bitterness and feeling left out, let down, of feeling passed over and ignored.

Why?

Because you don’t have anything close to that in your life where prayer is concerned. Maybe you’ve even reached the lowest point where you now believe answered prayer is for other people and not you.

That kind of bottomed-out place in the Christian life doesn’t come because you prayed for the small stuff like a perfect score on an exam or a sunny day vs. rain and it didn’t happen. It occurs when the love of your life or only child succumbs to cancer; when you’ve lost your job, no new prospects are in sight and you’re being evicted from your home; when you’ve prayed for the salvation of a parent, or sibling, or close friend and watched them die lost.

Ever had that feeling? Maybe not. Maybe you’re someone with a prayer journal chocked-full of answered prayers for nearly all those big divine petitions. But my own life experience and other Christians that I know aren’t reflective of batting a thousand with prayer.

You don’t need all your prayers to be knocked out of the park answer-wise to know that unanswered prayer can be a big stumbling block to many who struggle with the validity of their belief. It’s also something enemies of Christianity are quick to point out in their jabs at the faith.

For example, in Pearl Jam’s song Even Flow, which talks about a person with mental illness who is struggling on the streets and crying for help in every direction, one line says, “Oh, prayin', now to something that has never showed him anything”.

Then we have the godisimaginary website that starts its rationale against the existence of God with “Try praying.” At the end of that section, the author concludes “We have ample scientific evidence to demonstrate that the belief in prayer is nothing but pure superstition.”

A perfect illustration of unanswered prayer’s negative impact on people is depicted near the end of the movie “God’s Not Dead” when an atheist college professor who has attacked and ridiculed his Christian student’s faith throughout the film admits that it was his mother’s death from an illness and his unanswered prayers for her healing when he was young that drove him to atheism. When he talks to a pastor who attempts to help him, the pastor says that God sometimes says “no” to our prayers. With pain in his voice, the professor says, “He says no a lot.”

It can seem that way sometimes. No answers, just lots of silence.

Maybe this is why Christian author Philip Yancey once wondered if prayer was just, “a sanctified form of talking to myself.” 

The existential mismatch

The issue with unanswered prayer is much like many's struggle with God and the reality of evil. The Bible says God is all-powerful and all-loving yet we have horrors upon horrors in this life. What gives?

In the same way, Scripture clearly states “And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive” (Matt. 21:22) and “…whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight” (1 John 3:22). But yet so many Christian’s prayers seemingly go into a black hole. What gives?

What gives is we appear to have an existential mismatch between statements made in the Bible regarding evil and prayer and what really happens in life — they’re both apparent contradictions that stare us in the face and give us pause (or worse). But they shouldn’t and here’s why.

If every major character in Scripture was shielded from evil by a divine protective bubble and lived in a world filled with rainbows and lollipops, then we might have grounds for tossing our Bible in the trash. And if those same individuals received nothing but granted wishes from their prayers, we’d have even more cause for stepping off the train of Christianity.

But instead, many times we have just the opposite. And I mean the exact opposite. Here are just a few examples.

In David’s famous Psalm 22 prayer, quoted by Jesus on the cross, verse 2 says: “O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest”. Elsewhere in the Psalms, we read: “How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1); “My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” (Psalm 42:3); “I have become like a man without strength, forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, and they are cut off from Your hand (Ps. 88:4–5, my emphasis).

Job certainly thought he was ignored by God when he said: “I cry out to You for help, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You turn Your attention against me” (Job 30:20) and “Behold, I cry, ‘Violence!’ but I get no answer; I shout for help, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7).

Jeremiah complained, “Even when I cry out and call for help, He shuts out my prayer” (Lam. 3:8) and went on to say “You have covered Yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through” (Lam. 3:44).

In the New Testament, we have more than a few examples of unanswered prayer with two of the most well-known being Paul’s request to remove his thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12:8) and the Carpenter’s plea to avoid the cross (Luke 22:42).

When it comes to the negative effect unanswered prayer can have on us, my all-time favorite New Testament example is found in Acts 16 where we read that “Peter was kept in the prison, but prayer for him was being made fervently by the church to God” (Acts 12:5). If you know the story, you remember that God miraculously delivers Peter who then shows up on the doorstep of a house where “many were gathered together and were praying” (Acts 12:12).

Peter bangs to get in and a girl named Rhoda learns it’s him and goes to inform the others who shockingly tell her “You are out of your mind!” (Acts 12:15). Not, “Praise God — an answer to prayer!”, but instead “Girl, you’re nuts!” Now, why would they have that reaction?

Maybe it’s because earlier in the same chapter we read: “Now about that time Herod the king [the same guy who arrested Peter] laid hands on some who belonged to the church in order to mistreat them. And he had James the brother of John put to death with a sword” (Acts 12:1–2).

Don’t you think the same folks who were praying for Peter’s life prayed the same thing for James? But James was murdered, and their prayers went unanswered. You can imagine why they would think the same thing would happen to Peter even though they were praying for him.  

Major disappointments in prayer can do that to you.

To be sure, those are the head-scratching and faith-challenging times. Sure, there are lesser unanswered prayer situations that we can look back on and understand why God was silent — things like Garth Brook sings about in his song Thank God for Unanswered Prayers or that pastor Tim Keller talks about where he estimates that 75% of his younger-days prayers were bone-headed requests.

But then there are the “big ones.” Those rejections are hard to take. And all the talk of well-meaning believers who say your prayers encountered deaf ears because of sin in your life (Ps. 66:18), or your lack of persistence (Luke 18:1-8), or faith (James 1:6-8), or selfish desires (James 4:3) seems to fall short in those cases.  

C. S. Lewis seemed to understand that when he wrote his short essay, The Efficacy of Prayer. In it, he says:

“I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic … Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.”

And yet John still reminds us, “This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him” (1 John 5:14–15).

But what does having that “confidence” really mean? It doesn’t sound comforting at first, but Tim Keller takes a shot at it; let it slowly sink into your head, because it really does provide solace in the face of God’s will and unanswered prayer: “You must have this confidence every time you pray. That God will give you whatever you would have asked for if you knew everything like He does.”